The Function Room GoLoud

After a long hiatus, the function room is back and for the first episode, comedian and erstwhile mathsy type Dara O'Briain is the guest. We chat about all sorts, hard sums, looking at the stars, the fantasy of one day going back to learn 'just for the sake of it' and then agreeing that idea might need a bit more thought. And no he didn't do a masters but I make no apologies for embellishments for the sake of a pun.

This week on the function room, my guest is Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered a NEW TYPE OF STAR.
That’s like discovering A NEW TYPE OF STAR
Jocelyn was a postgraduate student at the time and famously her supervisor was awarded the Nobel Prize for radio pulsars, and there was no mention of Jocelyn. Even though she helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array – the thing that found it- over two years and she was the one who first noticed the weird data the was the radio pulsar, sometimes reviewing nearly 100ft of paper.
That is just one part of a long career and distinguished career. We talk about that and sexism in science, religion in science, and the perils of managing big data 1960s style and at the end inspired by Jocelyn, my daughters and I look up at the stars.

My guest is Rob Eastaway. Author of many books which make maths more interesting and accessible. He also has a podcast called Puzzling Maths with Andrew Jeffrey which you should check out if by some miracle you’re not getting all your maths vitamins from here.
His most recent book is Maths on the back of an Envelope and it’s about the surprising power of mental arithmetic. Along the way, finding out,how to tell the height of a tree using the remains of a savoury snack, estimating crowds, dividing restaurant bills, counting weddings, getting a rough idea of what’s going on using Rob’s favourite word: -ish
And generally hopefully, giving us all a bit of confidence to get the answer wrong but close enough.
At the very end Ruby takes his advice on board and just start adding stuff up out of the blue. Well not out of the blue, off the milk carton.
Follow me on twitter @colmoregan, the podcast @functionroompod.
Rob is at https://robeastaway.com/

Welcome back to the function room with me Colm O’Regan. This week, it's ChatGPT. The latest thing that makes people starting dropping the phrase AI into small talk.
ChatGPT and all the Ais are of huge interest to my guest. Conrad Wolfram. He’s kind of a big deal. Strategic and international director of Wolfram Research which makes Mathematica the computational software and nearly 4 decades in the area of computational education, Conrad has written The maths fix, about how AI will, or should make the maths we study in school very different. We talk steam engines, democracy and poems about lightbulb filaments. You know, the standard stuff.
Find him at conradwolfram.com, find chatGPT at chat.openai.com

My guest is Alan O’Reilly, about his hobby weather forecasting. I first met him when he was on my RTE Radio Show Colm O’Regan Wants A Word. But time constraints meant I don’t think we got to talk for the recommended daily weather talk intake of two hours.
Alan lives in County Carlow, in the southern midlands of Ireland from where he observes all the weather that the weather can throw at him.
We talk about the hot topic at the moment which is of course snow-drizzle called graupel, we talk about not-hearing-the-weather-forecast-anxiety, being lost in the snow, the unbearable lightness of solar panels, and some of the small numbers that make a big difference in the massive maths of weather, and why it all comes down to dew point.

This week Robert Boyle, born in Ireland in the 17th century was one of the world's great scientists. I'm talking about him with Eoin Gill, Eoin Gill is a director of Calmast STEM Engagement Centre at South East Technological University, who likes Robert Boyle so much he made an entire summer school about him. Boyle was a massive deal in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and his work laid the groundwork for modern chemistry, a founder of the Royal Society, part of a list of big scientific cheeses like Newton and Kepler who discovered the universe was a mathematical and not just a miraculous place.
But for all his science, dabbled in alchemy and sometimes he still just wanted a miracle.